h a l f b a k e r yYeah, I wish it made more sense too.
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[Category:Web:Social Media:Friends]
A remark when befriending someone why you did so. Some
background about posts they make or other stuff. If not available
in your social media app, have it as an addon that detects you
befriending someone and gives you some information about what
you recently
saw about this person or entity.
They admitted social media is programming us
https://www.wakingt...-is-programming-us/
Some very good reasons for not using facebook. [spidermother, Dec 11 2020]
[link]
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This implies that each relationship is a means to an end. Is that
not ethically problematic? |
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I liked your ideas so I befriended you |
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I don't have very many bakers as friends. I am feeling lost and
alone this Christmas season, and I'm retiring at months end
which means it's just me, the cat, and the pc...till death do us
part. |
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Cheer yourself up. Ditch the cat, get a dog. And more computers. Lots more computers ... |
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// Is that not ethically problematic? // |
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Gr. "morally problematic". |
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No, not if you're a sociopath. Your point is ...? |
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[bliss] Please don’t feel alone! We are all with you through our
enjoyment of your contributions here. Have a great Christmas and
take care of yourself.
Often I am able to work out the
reason someone is my ‘friend’ on Facebook by looking at who our
mutual friends are. |
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That wouldn't work for [xenzag], who doesn't have any friends... |
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//I don't have very many bakers as friends// Is that your choice, or theirs? If theirs, you have my heart-felt sympathy. If yours, you have my heart-felt empathy. |
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Your recent ideas have been underrated, [pashute]. Makes me wish I could see a list of all the ideas I have bunned... |
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//That wouldn't work for [xenzag], who doesn't
have any friends...// It’s true. I only have lovers!
ha |
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'Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.' - Terry Pratchett |
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[blissmiss]; being alone doesn't mean you should feel lost.
I'm mostly "just me & the cat" too, but I'm OK with that. It
depends on your personality-type, & if you need to be
among other people or not.
People I know who have retired found they became MORE
busy afterwards; always going places and doing things.
(And just ignore [8th of 7]...) |
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//I don't have very many bakers as friends.// |
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Yes you do. You may not see them every day, but you're in their
heads, and they're in yours. |
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Yes. [blissmiss], you definitely have friends here. I popped
over to your page, and not a fishbone to be seen! You are
well-liked around here :-) |
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<whispers>
we're in your head... there is no escape |
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I'll be your friend blissmiss |
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Yes ... and it's pretty cramped. Quit shoving, will you ? And it could do with a bit of a clean and a tidy up ... look at the dust ... |
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Even [Ian Tindale] was preferable to this ... all this junk and clutter ... |
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can't find the LIKE button on Spidermother's anno. @Jutta?! |
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Also 8th's, bliss, hippo, 4and20 (btw you CAN see all ideas you
bunned recently. using HB Views) , pocm, xenz, neutri, 2fries,
and chrono. |
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I meant it seriously. There's no getting around the fact that relationships with other people are always a means to an end. If the desired end is respect, trust, fairness, honesty, then I'm on an ethical path. When someone* refuses to choose friends carefully my thought is "See, this is why we can't have nice people." |
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(Incidentally, just as there is only one Donnie Darko movie, there is only one kind of friend. 'Friend' is not a button on farcebook.) |
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*such as my self, but hopefully less so lately. |
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//respect, trust, fairness, honesty// |
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These are good things, but aren't your notions of respect, trust,
fairness and honesty crystallized out of relationships you had
earlier? Or do you take a more Platonic view of these things? |
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// relationships with other people are always a means to an end // |
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At the most fundamental level, they're the means by which your DNA gets to duplicate itself. And to your DNA that's all that matters. |
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Evolution selects for an irreducible amount of self-interest rather than altruism*, because altruism is something that gets selected out. |
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*Although there is plenty of "apparent" altruism within species and particularly in groups of related individuals, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently describes. |
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[pertinax] A bit of both. I've learned to trust my intuition, partly because one time that I ignored it, the results were disastrous; and intuition is probably mostly crystallised out of previous experience. On the other hand, I have some explicit rules, such as 'never use the other's vulnerability to one's advantage', which if broken, tend to turn the switch marked 'friend' to the 'off' position. |
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Having said that, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by Platonic in this context. |
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And having said _that_, even my explicit rules are at least somewhat crystallised out of previous experience. My meta-rule is something like 'If things reliably go horribly wrong when someone does X, then a) don't do X, and b) don't associate with anyone who does X. |
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In Plato, concepts, including virtues, are assumed to have an
absolute existence, to be discovered like mathematical ideas.
So, for example, the "form" of Respect exists, always has and
always will, whether or not any people describe or practise it. |
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You might say that Plato is the opposite of someone like
Derrida. Does that clarify things? |
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I think Plato was onto something, though I don't think
those things exist in any way other than as a reliably
predictable consequence born from the interaction of
earlier postulates - a kind of Euclidean Platonism if you
will where triangles for example exist, but only as purely
abstract consequences of points, lines and space. These
things themselves only exist within some rational system,
but the fact that they do, means that system has the
property that it can contain the concept of triangles. Maybe there's a Platonic form for
that entire system, but a perfect ~Triangle~ can't exist in isolation from it. |
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And please, all present, consider yourselves having been
copiously besteemed with seasons instafriend likeemoji
status - valid for at least 3 weeks. Heart heart unicorn
smilyface partypopper cake rainbow. |
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In that case, when it comes to human relationships, I take more a subjective view than a Platonic one. In other words, I'm as hurt as I feel. I deal with such things as respect, betrayal etc. by forming policies, rather than by treating them as absolutes. |
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But that's not in any way to deny the Platonic concept, as you describe it. Trying to find absolutes in ethics is called natural law; it's possibly the most important, and ignored, topic of all. It's precisely why when someone refers to 'the law' as if it means nothing more or less than the insane rantings of narcissistic control freaks with the audacity to call themselves 'government', my reply is 'Them's fighting words'. |
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There's a halfway house between platonic ideals and learning through prior personal experience, and that is if the concept (e.g. respect) exists in the wider pool of Human society and natural language. That way you can listen to bedtime stories about exaggerated consequenses of lack of respect or misplaced trust (and the wolf ate them all for dinner) without actually having to suffer it personally. |
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There's an interesting argument that human folk tales and religions embody evolved packages of such emotional learning, and the breakdown of inherited traditions of folklore and religion contributes to the disfunction of modern society. On the other hand there is a counter argument that the natural evolutionary process of refining and improving the moral learning of intergeneration oral traditionary stories has been hijacked for a hundred generations or so by organised manipulators who have adjusted them to serve their own personal and institutional interests at the expense of wider society. |
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[pocmloc] Thank you for about the best pair of arguments to which to apply the Hegelian dialectic that I have seen. |
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The obvious synthesis is that both the argument and the counter-argument are true, and are not in any way incompatible. |
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A good way of summerising the longest-running scam in history is that when someone claims 'I wrote it down because it's the law', there's at least a possibility that he's telling the truth; but the idea that 'it's the law because special people wrote it down' is so obviously absurd that you'd have to torture generations of children in age-cohort-divided day-prisons for it to be widely accepted. |
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I hear you [spidermother] regards there being a distinction between the idea of "natural law" and the regular
kind, and my view is perhaps jaundiced by a lively first month studying rudimentary business & employment law
back in the 90's, where our teacher spent great pains thoroughly dis-acquainting us with any vestige of the idea
that law is just, fair, right or even natural. His view, which he successfully imparted upon us, was that the law (of the land) is
just was precisely what it is - a completely neutral thing, devoid of merit, justice or kindness, an empty cold
thing, that just was. A thing that had come about via one or another of various completely arbitrary processes. |
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That doesn't mean we shouldn't be interested in trying to align what we might consider natural law with
whatever laws are codified in the jurisdiction we happen to live in. Justice is something we should all want, and
law is a blunt instrument that (if you're feeling optimistic) helps stand in the way of the most egregious
divergences from natural law - albeit at the threat of state*-sanctioned action (which I suppose is the
fundamental stone upon which any set of laws stands). If you're feeling more neutral, then it's also a driver for
unanticipated (?) consequences that can sometimes be more damaging than the original thing the law was
supposed to fix - and *that's* assuming further (and this is truly an assumption too far) that benevolent
intentions were held by the people drafting those laws in the first place. |
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But as good people who (again optimistically) have some democratic power bestowed upon us, it should be our
hope and aim to try and reduce any gap between the two - even at the risk of causing there to be a conflation
between what is right, and what is law due to what we would hope to be an ever closing alignment. That doesn't
mean we should trust law to be good - I agree with my old law professor that we need to carefully consider the
law as being entirely an ethically empty vessel - but it does place an obligation on us to try and make it better. |
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* I considered using the word *group-sanctioned here, since families for example can agree on a set of rules to
follow, or any group of people - but I think we're talking about more formal legal frameworks here. |
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I suggest you consider the possibility that your teacher sold you a crock of shit. |
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For a start, natural law, BY DEFINITION, is not an idea, but reality. |
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You are right to take care over the use of the word 'state' as opposed to other terms for groups; but I would ask you to consider, what is the difference between 'the state', and any other group (such as 'the mafia'), outside of beliefs inside the minds of the victims? (hint: there is NO such difference). |
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//For a start, natural law, BY DEFINITION, is not an idea, but reality.//
Nah! "Natural" law is merely a concept that humans have adopted in order to try & understand or explain what we perceive as happening in our reality. That doesn't mean that they are either binding or correct.
If you nip over to the "List of Hardest Ideas to Grasp" thread, you will see a link to an article about the Wigners Friend experiment. It posits, & apparently proves, that two distinct realities can exist at the same time, which rather drives a coach & horses through current theories of both 'natural' law & social & criminal law, as they mostly all depend on a binary outcome (i.e. something either did or did not happen).
I wouldn't recommend using this as a defense the next time you are in court though. You'll probably get charged with contempt on top of any other offenses you are alleged to have committed. |
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By the way, in my mind natural law IS the regular kind (there's a nice pun in there for the linguists); my favourite definition of the other kind is 'scriblings of the insane'; but I'll settle for the more neutral 'political laws'. |
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[spidermother] I think I failed to get my point
across - it's not to say *natural* law isn't real -
but that the "law of the land" law is completely
arbitrary and divorced from what we might consider
natural law - the two are distinct things - which
unless I completely misunderstood your point - was
what I thought you were saying. |
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"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" |
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Surely "law" is just a set of arbitrary rules that people agree is the Law? |
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What does "natural law" even mean? |
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Natural law (at least as I'm interpreting it) is
what we might all consider to be justice. Ethics,
morality, fairness. The law (of the land) is an
arbitrary set of rules defined by whoever wields
the biggest stick. In a democracy (one hopes) that
the direct stick wielding is done under a system of
rules that we (largely) agree to abide by, and have
the means to change should we collectively get our
shit together to do so. In a mafia organisation,
that power is wielded and (most likely informally
codified by) whoever's whacked the most wise guys. |
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One (the law of the land) is a neutral ethics-free set of morally empty rules that
define behaviour at the threat of sanction, and the other (natural law) is what's
actually right and fair. We might *want* the law of the land to align with natural
law, but it's a mistake (as my college professor would have said) to believe that
they actually do. We were studying actual law of the land law, and not natural
law, which might have been the subject of a philosophy or ethics class, not
Business & Employment Law for thickos like me who failed to get into proper
university and got to study Business Management instead. |
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//what we might all consider//
Well you've got a problem right there, zt, haven't you! |
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It's not a problem as long as nobody actually goes
into the details - as a concept, we can all agree
that rightness, and properness are things. Beyond
that, as you rightly say, it gets more complicated. |
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Interestingly, I think this is one reason why the
law (of the land) completely abdicates itself from
concepts of ethics, rightness and properness and
concentrates instead on details of what is and
isn't "lawful". If you make it emotionless, then
everyone can agree that it's quite possibly an ass
and get on with it. It's a pragmatic decision,
quite possibly made on purpose to sidestep this very issue. |
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//justice. Ethics, morality, fairness// Yes all totally arbitrary and subjective really. |
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Again, [poc] I think I'm with [spidermother] on this
one - those things are real, the fact that we can't
agree on exactly what the details of them might be is
a separate issue. I know that sounds like a bit of
sleight-of-hand, but I think it's possible to
objectively believe in right and wrong. |
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//we can all agree that rightness, and properness are things//
Can we?
As an example, person A might think it is entirely reasonable & just that everyone stays in isolation for a while in order to restrict the spread of, say, a global pandemic. Whilst person B might think it is an unjust restriction on their God-given right to roam wherever the hell they like & if you don't want to catch a disease then stay the hell off of my golf course!
Meanwhile, person C, believing him/herself to be the only sane & sensible peron on the planet, might think that person A is a dupe of government propaganda & person B is a deranged madman.
Also, Hitler. (I thought I'd just throw that in so we can reset the counter on the "Days Since..." idea).<snigger> |
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I agree that the concept of rightness and rongness is a real thing. |
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I am unsure whether the categories of wrightmess and wrongness are wreal |
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I am pretty sure that there is no real thing that could be said to be a natural member of either such category. |
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//It's a pragmatic decision, quite possibly made on purpose//
Yes, it absolutely was. If you go back through history, you will see that laws were mostly established in order to create a uniformity of what a kingdoms subjects could expect to be punished for by the crown. It was nothing to do with wrong or right but was, essentially, your 'undemocratic' mafia bosses establishing just who was in charge around here.
Many of those early laws still persist today, many by dint of historical inertia, i.e. that's the way it's always been & nobody can agree on a suitable replacement.
It has always* amused me that most of the laws we live under were made up by people who are dead & that young people (anyone under 50 for the most part) live under a set of laws that they have had no hand in creating. There's justice for you!
* I say "always" but that's obviously a massive exaggeration.**
** Well, a lie really. |
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1. Natural law is what happens in reality, whether we like it or not, and regardless of our beliefs and opinions. |
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2. The science of natural law is the attempt to discover the principles that determine what happens in reality. |
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3. The law of the land (legem terrae) is the set of rules that (essentially) everyone in a given group agree to be the right way to behave. |
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4. The common law, at least in theory, is the expression of the law of the land, primarily in the form of findings by juries ('the people's common law), and secondarily (again, at least in theory) by judges or magistrates ('judges' common law'). |
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5. Legislation (defined sometimes as 'the written will of the legislative department') is another thing altogether. No-one - I repeat, no-one - who has studied these conceps carefully, and who is honest, ever asserts that legislation creates binding obligations on anyone. And yet nearly every adult uses the term 'the law' as if it were a synonym for legislation, but is unable (or unwilling) to articulate that they are doing so. Legislation IS NOT the law of the land, although it may coincidentally agree with it. |
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I find that I can have productive discussions about these concepts with roughly 5 to 7 year olds - whose minds have not yet been filled with absurd crap - and with (a few) people who are seriously studying law at a post-graduate level, and have therefore had to go back and carefully re-learn the basics. |
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OK, so [spidermother] it's the use of the word "law"
as being crudely synonymous with "legislation" that
you take issue with. Fair enough. I think it's clear
we understand the distinction between ethics (into which I'd class your points 1 and 2) and
legislation (within which I'd crudely and perhaps strictly inaccurately lump case law as
well as written acts of parliament, or your points 4,5)* even if we differ on strict
interpretation of terms - I'll be honest, I'd not
come across this specific idea of "law" as not being
synonymous with legislation before. |
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*Interesting is point 3 which to me expresses a kind of prototypical form of common legislation as it may have stood in
(parts of) England in the 1200's. This is either an arbitrary accident of a specific time and place, or something more lofty.
It's certainly historically of interest and likely has its own roots in a mix of Norman, Saxon, Viking, and going back further, Roman and
Celtic mores. |
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Yes; specifically, I see conflation of the term 'the law' with legislation as incorrect and dangerous. De Jasey [edit - it was actually Albert J. Knock] made the point that the belief in legislation, and in the right of judges to interpret that legislation, is a way by which 'anything can be made to mean anything'. Some of the 'founding fathers' similarly warned against the idea of judges' determining 'constitutionality'. I would put it this way: if one group of people can decide what is the law of a different group of people, that situation is not so much the potential for tyranny, it is already full-blown tyranny. |
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One of the most startling things that ever happened to me was when I interviewed a local councilman (he used to be Mayor back in the 1960s, and has been involved ever since, so he's certainly a goldmine of information). He actually said to me 'We're judge, jury and executioner' ('we' meaning the council, meaning the elected members and the Mayor). I think I was too shocked even to reply; but I thought 'Well there's your problem! Division of powers? Kangaroo courts? Hello!?' |
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The elephant in the room here is applicability. For instance, most people in, say, Florida would not think that the Canadian tax code applies to them and creates obligations on them, and they'd be right; conversely, most people in Florida would think that the US tax code applies to them and creates obligations on them, BUT THEY'D BE WRONG. |
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I have recently deleted my Facebook account after
12 years of that nonsense. Some of those people
were my real friends in my real life, some of those
people are halfbakers (Who I would like to
consider as friends) and some were Flickr contacts.
I would prefer they were called Contacts instead
of friends... |
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[bliss] You are my friend whether I am on Facebook
or not! |
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What [xandram] said. Except I've never had a Facebook account. |
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Its worth creating one just for the satisfaction of subsequently deleting it! |
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// I have a lot of friends in the physical and online realms, and no trouble remembering when, how, or why we became friends. // |
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"Trolls have a numeral system of their own, based on powers of 4. The base numerals are one (1), two (2), three (3), many (4) and lots (16), which can be combined to form higher numbers." - Terry Pratchett. |
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We suspect you have misunderstood the difference between "many" and "lots". We can just about give credence to the the assertion that you have "many" friends although counting a passer-by as a friend just because they toss a coin in your hat as they walk past the doorway where you squat may not entirely fulfill the usual definition. |
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We will concede that you probably have, on balance, more friends than [xenzag], but then there are things that live on petri dishes in Hazmat containment that have more friends than that... |
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I was thinking, but before I deleted my Facebook I
actually unfriended some people who were really
annoying me. Maybe if this was an* unfriend
reason*, I might have more use for it. Also I
consider Facebook an anti-social media |
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Dangerous habit ... don't worry, there's help and treatment available. Don't be ashamed; there's hope, many have been completely cured. Just tune in to Fox News and within hours you'll just be another slack-jawed, drooling, glassy-eyed Democrat ... |
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<Gloats over uptick in Soylent Corporation share price/> |
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8th - You forgot to mention by contrast the
benefits of
being a bleach drinking, hoax believing, flat
earther republican. (like yourself) |
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Inner cleanliness of both mind and body, what could possibly be better ? |
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Well, maybe stock options in a Sodium Hypochlorite plant ... |
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Being a Flat Earther is great - navigation is so much easier when you don't have to fuss around with all that stupid, fiddly spherical geometry. |
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I'm sorry I posted and then got terribly busy and forgot to
come back. (Volunteered to pass out toys to kiddos with
little hope of much more than donated toys today). |
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Thank you all for the kindness and warm-hearted
sentiments. I think what I meant at the time was I don't have
many bakers as "Facebook friends". I do feel as though this
community has almost always been a friendly type of place
to visit with lots offered up to think about, as well as laugh
at. |
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And once I retire I intend to completely redecorate two
rooms in my apartment, travel to Connecticut to help my
bestie move to Amherst, and do a lot more watercolor
paintings. Also there's never enough time to meditate,
especially in these challenging times. I hope everyone is
healthy in the New Year, and stays virus free. Thank you
again. |
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I just felt left out and wanted to annotate to something. |
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uhhhh, that's better. Like cracking your knuckles but without the sound |
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